CHAPTER IVTHE MIGRANTS
Timewas, and is no more, when invalids, hopeful and hopeless, thronged the eastern foothills of the Rockies till there was no longer houseroom for them in the cities, and a new word “lunger” was grafted upon the exuberant stock of Western folk speech to distinguish them. Unlike the pioneers of a still earlier day, who crossed the plains with their worldly possessions snugly sheltered beneath the canvas tilt of a single prairie schooner, these migrants for health’s sake were chiefly of the class which neither toils nor spins, and to the foothill cities they presently added suburbs architecturally characteristic each after its kind. In these suburbs the trim-built town house of New England is the commonest type, but the more florid style of the middle West is not lacking, and now and then, in the roomier city fringe, there are replicas done in red brick of the low-storied, wide-verandaed country house of the South.
Such was the home of the Langfords in the Highlands of North Denver. Driven from the ancestral acres in the blue-grass region of Tennessee in the late afternoon of his life, the judge had determined to make the new home in the life-giving altitudes as nearly like the old as money and the materials at hand would compass, and he had succeeded passing well. He had bought acres where others bought lots, and the great roomy house, with its low-pitched roof and wide verandason three sides, stood in the midst of whatsoever Tennessee greenery would stand transplantation from the blue-grass region to the less genial climate of the clear-skied altitudes.
On pleasant Sunday afternoons, when Dorothy was at her mission school and the judge slept peacefully in his own particular chair, when Mrs. Langford followed her husband’s example in the privacy of her room, and Will was no one ever knew just where, the hammock slung at the corner of the veranda which commanded a view of the mountains was Isabel’s especial convenience. For one reason, there was the view; for another, the hammock swung opposite that portion of the low railing which was Harry Antrim’s favourite perch during the hour or two which measured his customary Sunday afternoon visit.
Being very much in love with Isabel, Antrim was quite willing to turn his back upon the scenery for the sake of looking at her. And as between a winsome young woman swinging in a hammock—a young woman with laughing brown eyes and a profusion of glory-tinted hair framing a face to which piquancy and youthful beauty lent equal charms—who but a scenery-mad pilgrim of the excursion trains would think of making a comparison?
In these Sunday afternoon talks Isabel could be abstract or concrete as occasion demanded. What time the young man dwelt overmuch on railway matters, she found it convenient to be able to look over his shoulder at the mighty panorama unrolled and unrolling itself in endless transformation scenes against the western horizon. And when Antrim, finding himself ignored, would come back from things practical to things personal, she had but to close her eyes to the scenic background and to open them again upon the personality of her companion.
Conceding nothing to what he was pleased to call her artistic fad, Antrim was willing to condone Isabel’s indifference to railway affairs. His business was a part, the greater part, of his life, but he could understand why Judge Langford’s daughter, as such, might easily weary of railway shop talk. True, there had been more or less of it all along in the old days in Tennessee, when the judge was counsel for the railway company of which Antrim’s father was the superintendent; but that was because the Langfords and Antrims dwelt side by side and were friends as well as neighbours. Here in Colorado it was different. The judge was an invalid—a migrant for health’s sake, with gear sufficient to make him independent of railway counsellorships, and with little left of his former connection save a pocketful of annual passes and a warm affection for the son of his old friend the superintendent.
None the less, Antrim thought that Isabel might bear with him now and then, if only for the reason that she would at some time begin to eat the bread and meat of railway service and so continue to the end of the chapter. This, indeed, he had the temerity to say to her one Sunday afternoon some weeks after his return from the exile of division duty at Voltamo. By which it will be seen that Antrim was a very young man, and as yet no more than a novice in the fine art of love-making.
“I do take an interest in your affairs, Harry; you know I do. I am glad to see you succeeding in something you really like. But I wish”—she stopped, and let her gaze go beyond him—“I wish you wouldn’t always talk as if—” She paused again, and Antrim finished the protest for her:
“As if my prospects and your future were one and the same thing, you mean?”
“Yes; it stirs me up and makes me feel resentful.I know I can’t paint very much yet, but that is no reason why I shouldn’t attain by and by, is it?”
“None in the world. It’s only when you side-track me for art that I get restive. No man could be patient under that. Besides, you are never going to be a bachelor of art; you are going to be married to me, and then you can paint for fun as much as you like.”
Isabel’s retort was emphasized by a piquant little grimace of defiance:
“That is what you have been telling me ever since I can remember. I didn’t mind it so much in the boy and girl stage; but when you say such things now, it only makes it more than ever impossible.”
“Why does it?”
“Because it shows that you still cling to the idea that my love for art is nothing but a schoolgirl fad. It isn’t anything of the kind; and you and father and all the rest of them ought to know it by this time.”
“Oh, pshaw!” said Antrim, relapsing into disgusted silence.
Isabel touched the toe of her slipper to the floor and swung the hammock gently. As a comrade, brother—as anything, in fact, but a lover—she fellowshipped Antrim with hearty frankness. They had known each other from early childhood, and the outspoken familiarity of such an acquaintance is not to be set aside by the mere formality of a one-sided love-making.
He was a nice boy, she thought, suffering herself to moralize a little while he was recovering his equanimity. He always looked so well groomed, and his severe taste in the matter of raiment was very creditable. And he was capable, too; every one said that of him. Still he was but a boy; and his smooth-shaven face made him look years younger than he really was; and he wouldn’t wear a mustache, as she wanted him to; and—and——
“Why don’t you say something?” snapped the subject of her moralizings.
“I was thinking about you, and I supposed you would be glad to have me keep quiet if I would do that.”
“I don’t know about that. It depends very much upon what you were thinking. I could tell better if I heard the recapitulation.”
Isabel tossed her head disdainfully. “Anybody would give me a penny for my thoughts,” she said.
“Oh, if it’s a pecuniary matter, here”—and he took a coin from his pocket and gave it to her.
“Thanks! I need some new brushes, and father says I am extravagant. Now you shall have what you have paid for. I was thinking that you know how to dress becomingly—and that you are smart—and that your salary is enough to make poor people envious—and that you look absurdly young—and that a mustache would make you look years older—a-n-d——”
Antrim sawed the air with his arm as he would have slowed down a reckless engineer.
“That will do; you have earned the dollar. But you won’t mind my saying that I can get myself abused for less money. Do you ever have a really serious thought, Isabel? Take time to think about it, and tell me honestly.”
Again Isabel’s gaze went past him, bridging the bare plain and seeking infinity in the heights rising in mighty grandeur beyond the flat top of Table Mountain. When she spoke, raillery had given place to enthusiasm.
“Could any one live in sight of that”—pointing to the high-piled grandeur—“and not have thoughts too big for any kind of expression?”
“Oh, artistic thoughts, yes; I’ll admit that you can outthink most people on that line,” he rejoined.
“That is right; gird, if you want to. You are a Philistine, and you can’t help it, I suppose. Just thesame, art is the real reality, and your petty business affairs are merely the playthings of life. If I could put on canvas the faintest impression, the merest foreshadowing of what you can see over there, every other accomplishment or enjoyment in the world would seem little by comparison.”
“There you go again,” said Antrim. “Now I like pretty things as well as anybody, but when you try to make me believe that the painting of them is the chief end of man—or of woman, for that matter—why, it’s like—” He searched for a sufficiently strong simile, and not finding one, ended rather irrelevantly. “Between you and Brant, I have a hard time of it trying to keep my feet on the everyday earth.”
Isabel ignored the tirade and went off at a tangent, as was her custom with Antrim.
“Mr. Brant is a college graduate, isn’t he?” she asked.
“Yes, I believe so. What of it?” demanded Antrim, who was so wholly imbued with the afflatus of business as to think small of scholarly attainments.
“Nothing; only I was thinking how much a college man has to be thankful for.”
“I don’t see your point,” Antrim objected. “Take Brant, for instance; how is he any better off than the rest of us?”
“The mere fact that you can ask such a question is its best answer,” replied Isabel pertly. “You are a specialist; you have lived in a business rut until you can’t see out over the edges. You know that rut well enough, I suppose, but you would be utterly helpless if you should ever happen to be dragged out of it.”
“I don’t mean to be dragged out of it. A rut is a good thing when you come to know it well. Furthermore, I never saw the time when I was as helpless as the average college graduate.”
“That is nonsense,” said Isabel sweetly. “And, besides, it isn’t original nonsense; you have had it said for you by every self-made man the world ever saw. The college man has this advantage in your own particular field: he can usually take hold of things where other people leave off. That isn’t mine; it’s father’s. But I agree with him.”
It was Antrim’s turn to scoff. “I don’t believe that. I have seen too many of them shoved into railway positions that they couldn’t hold down. There was Pollard, on the west end—given a division when he didn’t know the difference between a mogul and a switch engine. Nice mess he made of it before he got through.”
“That may be; but at the same time Mr. Pollard had probably forgotten more things than most railway men ever know. Now, there is Mr. Brant; he doesn’t ever have to talk ‘shop.’ He knows books, and art, and penology, and a hundred other things.”
Whereat Antrim lost patience, as who would not?
“Brant be hanged!” he exclaimed wrathfully. “I am sick and tired of having him held up to me as an example. I wish I had never brought him here!”
“Thank you for nothing,” snapped Isabel; and for five full minutes neither of them spoke. As usual, it was the man who finally made the overture toward peace.
“How is the ‘Sunset in the Platte Cañon’ coming on?” he asked placably.
“It is done—as much as anything of that kind ever is done.”
“Shall we go in and look at it?”
Isabel got out of the hammock rather reluctantly, and they tiptoed past the sleeper at the other end of the veranda. In the room which Isabel called her studio she uncovered a canvas on an easel and ran theshades up to get a better light. Antrim made a proper show of examining the picture, and was silent so long that she was moved to say, “Well?” with a sharp little upward inflection.
“It’s no use,” he admitted good-naturedly. “You say I can’t criticise, and when I try, it only makes you angry.”
“It is your duty to try, anyway. Besides, I am in a lovely temper to-day.”
Antrim had his own opinion as to that, but he stood off and tried to imagine himself at the impossible point of view from which the picture was painted. Failing utterly in this, he drew up a chair and sat down to go over it patiently for small errors in detail. Isabel presently grew restive, knowing well from past experience what was coming.
“It doesn’t seem to me that the station at Buck Creek looks just like that,” he said at length. “It’s a longer building than you have made it, and the platform comes out farther this way.”
“Anything else?” asked the artist sweetly.
“Yes; you have put two gondolas and a box car here on the side track. I don’t believe there ever were that many cars set out there at one time.”
“How dreadfully unfortunate!” said Isabel, with well-simulated concern.
“Yes, it is rather awkward. Can’t you paint one or two of them out? Then, you have put this switch stand on the wrong side of the track; the engineer couldn’t see that target until he got right up to it, and then he’d be in the ditch.”
Isabel said, “Yes—go on”; and Antrim went on, glad enough to have found something which he was competent to criticise.
“Then, these cars again: if you don’t paint them out you’d better paint them over. There are no high-sidedgondolas on the narrow gauge, and no cars of any kind as big as these you have here.”
It was unkind of Isabel to stand at the back of his chair where he could see none of the signs of the gathering storm, and there was no note of warning in her reply.
“Do you really think they are too large?”
“I don’t think; I know. And I’ll prove it to you,” said he, confidently, taking his pencil and a slip of paper, and making sundry measurements on the station building in the picture. “Now, see here: this is what I mean. If you have kept the proportions right on this building, it ought to be about six feet between these two marks. Using that for a scale, you see these cars are about twice as long as they ought to be. And when you come to the height——”
Isabel flung the cloth over the painting and burst out passionately: “That is enough; it’s a picture—not a mechanical drawing! I knew there were miles enough between us, but you never miss a chance to count them all over to me. I——”
She choked, and turned quickly to the window, and Antrim, who was slow to anger, tried to make amends.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You know I told you it was no use. I’ll admit that I don’t know a good picture when I look at it.”
“I sha’n’t trouble you to look at any more of mine.” This to the window.
“I like to look at them; and I’ll praise them, too, if that is what you want. But you always say you want criticism.”
“And so I do, but I don’t care to be made fun of.”
“I wasn’t making fun of you; I was merely pointing out the things I know are wrong. And what I saidmay be nothing against the picture as a work of art; it may be a masterpiece, for all I know about such things.” This he said, being willing to pour still more oil on the troubled waters.
“You didn’t say anything at all about the colouring.”
“Because I don’t know anything at all about colour—unless it’s the colour of your eyes and hair. Let’s drop it, Isabel, and talk about something of a great deal more importance—to me. When are you going to put me out of my misery?”
The time was ill chosen, and she answered him accordingly:
“That is dead and buried; there is no use in going back to it.”
“Yes, there is,” he insisted. “I have waited pretty patiently for a long time, Isabel, and—and—well, I can’t wait always.”
But Isabel was still tingling with pique, and she replied without so much as turning her head.
“End it, then. I never asked you to wait.”
He was on his feet in a moment.
“Don’t talk that way,” he pleaded; “it hurts. I am not going to urge you any more now, because you are angry about the picture. But I want to say this: I can’t take a jesting answer, or an angry one, always. When we speak of it again you must either take me or send me away; and—and you’ll listen to reason, won’t you, Isabel?”
She continued to look steadfastly out of the window and gave him no word of encouragement.
“Won’t you, Isabel?” he repeated.
Still no answer.
“Isabel, I’m going now.”
She did not speak or move until she heard the front gate latch behind him. Then she ran to theeasel and snatched the cloth from the newly finished picture.
“Oh, I hate you!” she burst out spitefully; and when Dorothy came in, a few minutes later, the offending canvas had disappeared from the post of honour in the studio.